The market for hospitality technology solutions is replete with standalone booking management software solutions solving different parts of a hotelier’s day to day pain points. While each hotelier needs products offering Hotel Operations, Inventory & Rate Distribution, as well as Intelligence Revenue Enhancement solutions, each of these hotel software systems are complex systems in their own right and expensive as well. Also seamless integration between these booking management software is either unstable or extremely costly for a single hotel to do its own.

Lets first demystify each technology solution for easier understanding so that it is easy for hotels to choose the best hospitality software.

Traditionally hospitality management software have been synonymous with Hospitality operations Management Softwares or hospitality software or booking software. Often these are also referred to as PMS or Hotel Management Systems or Hospitality Management Softwares. Traditional hospitality management software have been offline softwares installed locally at the hotel’s servers which physically reside in the hotel’s premises and are closed to the outside world and online revenue channels. While there has been a move recently towards Cloud PMSes or cloud based hospitality management systems globally, the available solutions still available largely focus on improving the hotels front office, restaurant and accounts functions.

There is also a bunch of distribution products, commonly referred to as Channel Managers, which solve distribution for a hotel through a single interface which syncs seamlessly through all online sources of revenue, be it Online Booking Sources like Expedia, booking.com, ,Airbnb or meta search engines like Tripadvisor or Google or the hotel’s own direct booking engine. While the general functionality provided by most channel managers is similar, the differentiation comes in the form of feature sets and flexibility available within these hospitality management software. However most channel managers are still not able to sync seamlessly with the hospitality management software. Many channel managers are standalone pieces of software that just do this basic task of syncing rates and inventory of different OTAs through a single extranet.

Then there are a bunch of intelligence products which do standalone data aggregation and presentation tasks like online reputation management – ie tracking your hotel’s reviews across different online platforms and alerting the management when a negative review is witnessed. Many go into further feature sets like allowing a single sign-in response to all online reviews, semantic analysis to understand the severity of pain points and much more.

There are also Rate Shoppers or Competitive Rate Tracking softwares which are constantly scanning the hotel and its competitor’s pricing across all Online Booking Sites and alert a hotel when they witness a certain trend like a fall in competitor pricing or an increase.

And then there are Revenue Management products which offer intelligent dynamic pricing solutions to a hotel by enabling the hotel to automate its price changes when certain changes are witnessed in their own occupancy or their competitor sets pricing or a bunch of such external factors.

Why are most of these products mostly standalone?

The reason why each of these products are mostly standalone is because, be it online booking system or channel manager or revenue manager or hotel management software…the pain points each of them solve are complex and require deep expertise to build. Companies that have the skillset to build or solve one pain point rarely have the skillset or expertise to solve a completely different pain point for the hotel. Often these products require various levels of feedback from clients and require time and patience to be tested and perfected. Building each of these separate products into a single seamless Booking Software or Revenue Management software or Hospitality Management Software which is all encompassing is therefore an exponentially more complex task because of the enormity of the data and code that goes into perfecting it not to mention years of quality assurance, testing and client feedback. Also lets not underestimate the fact the building something simple and easy to use is more complicated and time consuming because it has to solve the most complex tasks as well the day-to-day mundane operations seamlessly through a few clicks.

What exactly is the power of all solutions integrated into a single sophisticated product?

The true benefits of integrated booking software or hospitality management software can be witnessed in areas like reduction in staff strength because your online channels are always updated with available inventory because your hospitality management system and booking software is always connected, therefore no one is required to manually keep the OTAs or Channel Manager connected. Also, Revenue Enhancement is another power that all-in-one integrated booking software present because now your revenue management software can take multiple variables into consideration while triggering a certain price for a certain date. This is because all these data points are gathered from different part of the same booking software – occupancy from the hospitality management software, current versus historical pickup trend and pace from the online booking system or in other words the online booking system or centralized reservation system, competitor rates from the rate shopper and review rating from the reputation management solution. Because of the power of these data points, your revenue management solution can offer superior results in the form of revenue enhancement through intelligent and dynamic pricing. And of course, having multiple hotel software systems available in a single seamless hotel management solution can also save a hotel costs because you are dealing with one hotel booking management system which solves a wide array of solutions rather than 4-5 different companies.

Why is DJUBO different?

Djubo is a complete offline cum online booking system or in other words an all in one hospitality management software built by hoteliers for hoteliers. Often hoteliers find themselves crying hoarse in their day to day interaction with these technology providers…why? This is because the hoteliers are living the pain every single day and understand the importance of feature sets and the advantages that interoperability of different booking software presents. However most technology companies have a limited and fixed domain in terms of tech roadmap. Rarely does a company attempt to build an end to end ecosystem for solving all major pain points of a hotel.

Why does any booking software need to focus on being more of an online booking system in today’s day and age?

The words online booking system can have 2 different connotations. One is that of being a cloud based booking software which is accessible from any location via a browser or a mobile or tablet app. And their other connotation is that of the booking software being focused on driving more online bookings for the hotel. Lets study both perspectives and see why both are essential and how DJUBO solves them.

As far as every hospitality software being a cloud based hospitality management software is concerned, traditional softwares required heavy hardware spends in the form of physical servers. Also any upgrade or maintenance of these offline software required a patch to be installed remotely. These offline software were closed software and clunky and not connected to the revenue channels of the hotel. DJUBO has built an end to end hospitality software which is cloud based and can be accessed from any location without any installation or physical infrastructure. It is simply plug and play and every hotel can be onboarded and trained easily and remotely.

As far as every hospitality software having a heavy flavor of also being an online booking system is concerned, it is certain a new age requirement and overriding industry ask because all revenue sources are moving online in a big way. Online booking system connect the hospitality software running the hotel’s operations to the world of online travel portals by way of a seamless sync of their availability and rates. Online booking system also have the capability to connect hotel software to meta search engines as well as the hotel’s own booking engines. By doing this the hotel’s reach and distribution is maximized and the instances of bounces and underselling is minised thereby increasing the trust score of these properties on online channels and thereby revenues.

What are some of the other softer factors that go into making any hotel booking software stake its claim to being the best hotel software?

While there is a plethora of hotel management systems, each staking their claim into being better than the other, every hotel needs to carefully evaluate the following points before boiling down to best hospitality software suitable for itself.

(1) Interoperability of modules: If the product interface of the hotel booking system you are currently evaluating has multiple modules, but interoperability in terms of one module seamlessly integrated or interacting with another module is not possible or if the user cannot manage all available modules through a single login, then clearly you need to look for another booking management software which allows for seamlessly interoperability.

(2) Training Resources: Even the most basic hotel booking management system needs to come with an evolved self-help training library which is available at all times and is easy to navigate through while getting started with the software. If any hotel booking system lacks a training library of videos then it can certainly not claim to be the best hotel booking software out there.

(3) Easy and Intuitive Interface: Any serious online hotel booking software aiming to compete with the best hotel booking system in the world need to invest in a simple yet deep user interface which is simple enough for a young trainee at the hotel to use as well as deep enough for an evolved hotelier seeking to solve complex issues in their day-to-day operations. Most online hotel software, or in other words online hotel booking software, are just copies of archaic hotel booking software and hence look and feel like age-old software which is not intuitive enough for a young millennial to navigate through easily. Better staff engagement with the online hotel software requires that the software is new age and the interface is comparable to soft of the latest apps that the young generation uses on a day-to-day basis already. For a software to stake its claim to being the best hotel booking system, it certainly needs to look and feel like the interface of some of the world’s most popular consumer applications like gmail, facebook, uber etc.

(4) Mobile friendliness: The hotel industry has come a long way in terms of offering unique guest experiences. For example any new age hotel system staking a claim to being the best hotel software out there needs to invest behind mobile applications in a big way. This is because the hotel’s front office as well as sales team is not almost always on the move. Guest Check-ins happen now on tablets and sales employees can make bookings from the field instead of sending requests telephonically to their central reservation office. The best hotel software which is serious about solving these new age issues of the hotel industry, therefore cannot ignore having a mobile application for its users.

DJUBO’s roadmap as a 360 degree all in one hotel technology product

DJUBO is built for hoteliers by hoteliers. DJUBO’s vision is to bring a fully integrated set of modules designed specifically for the hotel industry to the door steps of every single hotelier. There are bits and pieces products that exist globally solving different parts of the problem for a hotel manager. Getting access to a seamlessly integrated piece of software is difficult and DJUBO aims to solve it by way of a product designed for the small hotelier and built to cater to his property management, channel management, revenue management, reputation management and rate shopping needs by way of a single product.

DJUBO’s roadmap includes building a concierge app which seamlessly integrates the pre-arrival journey of a guest with his or her in stay experience by way off offering his access to the hotel’s services in a single application.

Another roadmap item is to look at internet of things as a product area for hotel technology development. Some thoughts in that direction include seamless checkin through app based door locks, facial recognition software for guest registration as well as employee attendance.

Djubo also wishes to focus on in-stay feedback solicitation to guage guest feedback at multiple touchpoints during his / her stay to take corrective actions early.

Ofcourse DJUBO’s roadmap also includes going much deeper in PMS functionality by way of an in house accounting backend as well as a store and consumption management software.

As direct bookings grow, DJUBO wishes to launch features to increase deal flow from the hotel’s own website by way of more enquiries as well as more conversions.